University of California Chancellor Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of African American Studies

Christiana Kallon Kelly received a PhD in Education, Culture, and Society with a certificate in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests focus on education, youth, gender, and politics in Africa. More specifically, she examines schools as sites of cultural and political transformation for African youth in the past and present. Christiana has published in the Journal of Modern African Studies and Africa Policy Journal. As a UCLA Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, she will explore the legacies of gender and colonial secondary schooling in Africa and the African Diaspora through archival and ethnographic research on the Annie Walsh Memorial School in Freetown, which is the first girls’ secondary school in West Africa. In addition, she will finish her manuscript entitled “Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and James Aggrey: African Students and Teachers of Black Liberation, 1920-1945.” Christiana was born in Sierra Leone and raised in Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda, and Bangladesh before immigrating to the United States in 2007.

  • PhD.,  University of Pennsylvania, 2023.
  • MS.Ed.,  University of Pennsylvania, 2016.
  • B.A.,  College of William & Mary, 2011.